I took this as a bit of a challenge because I consider(ed) myself pretty knowledgeable in Lightroom, so I set about trying to edit an image from a recent session only in Lightroom. I did so by trying to use the adjustment brush to “brush in” contrast, saturation and darkness around my subject. In the end, I found it took even MORE time than my usual photoshop edits and posted back in the thread for advice. What was posted in return was that I was going about it backwards, which was her point to begin with! In LR, it’s easier/more effective to darken/saturate the whole image and then brush back in brightness just on the subject. Total lightbulb moment!

So I tried on this recent session to edit ALL the images only in Lightroom. Once I figured it out and edited one image to my liking, it was very easy to apply the edits across the whole session and it did save a huge amount of time. More importantly, the results were super consistent. I did have to retouch a bit of a rash on the older child’s face and I really cannot live without portraiture, so I did run it on several of the images so you might say that these were edited 99% in LR and 1% in photoshop. Just for full disclosure :)

I recorded a video showing my editing steps, it will take us from this SOOC:

to this:

Before I post a link to the video, I have to apologize for the audio.. I should have checked my mic levels but alas I did not, so there is a bit of annoying distortion!

Leave a comment if you have any questions!

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create a smart collection in Lightroom which will automatically pull JUST the PSD files from a given folder or collection (or any number of things depending on what rules you add to it!)

I think I filmed this one at about 2am and I start coughing at the end and had to make an abrupt exit… not my best video, but I think it gets the job done!

This is a technique that I use with all of my baby or baby and parents on black. Even though the SOOC looks like this:

It’s just a few quick steps to get that clean pure black look:

Let me know if you have any questions!

I first learned this method of improving local contrast from Damien in a thread he posted on ILP.  If you don’t already know about Damien’s blog, he’s got some really great posts and tutorials about everything from post processing to calibrating your monitor. Definitely worth a look!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!

All it takes is one tiny hue/sat adjustment layer to go from blah yellow grass:

to this:

It’s a subtle change, but just by adding some blue the grass looks less dead and much more vibrant! (click on the images for a larger version on flicker where the change is more obvious.)

The trick is to use a hue/saturation adjustment layer and then from the drop down choose “yellows” and then bring your hue slider over to the right. This was the adjustment I used for this image:

Here’s one more  less subtle example:

after:

You may wonder why I choose yellow instead of greens which seems more intuitive.  Well, the answer to that riddle lies in this excellent post by  my friend Damien!

Now, the catch is that because we are adjusting yellows which are very prominent in skintones, we also have to mask back any skin areas by painting with a black brush on our hue/sat layer.  It takes me about 3 seconds to do this type of adjustment, but it really makes the color sing.   The trick is to use the same adjustment for all of your images in the shoot, you don’t want the grass to look a different shade of green in every shot!

I realize that this post probably would have been more useful during summer when there actually was still green grass, but that would just make too much sense ;)

Here is the before:

Before removing color cast (see under her chin!)

And now the after:

After removing the green color cast

The great thing about my technique to do this is that it is QUICK and you don’t have to be very precise. I’m sure there are many other ways to do it, but this works great for me, which is why I’m sharing it with you!

Let me know if you have any questions! :)

I realized after recording this that I left a couple of important things out.. you can not use content aware scale on an image that is your locked background layer. You have to have the image you are trying to stretch be a layer on TOP of your background layer.  The easiest way to achieve this is if you create a PSD file that is the size that you want to stretch the canvas to and then copy or duplicate the image into that document as a separate layer. Then you are good to go to scale that image to the size of your canvas!

Otherwise if you are just starting from your image as a jpg or RAW file you can go to canvas size and make your canvas larger. Then, go to your background layer and use the marquis tool to select the original size of your image (i.e. leaving off the white or black fill that is now around it) and then copy and paste that into a new photoshop layer before you scale it.

Let me know if you have any questions!

So you MAY have noticed that your DSLR has the option to shoot in just jpg (in a variety of sizes) or RAW + jpg.  This is probably all foreign to you if you just upgraded from a point and shoot that only shoots jpg.   Almost ALL serious photographers shoot in RAW and here’s two big reasons why:

1) It’s a non-destructive image format – you can make many more exposure, color, saturation and White Balance (hereafter I will refer to this as “WB” in this post) without degrading or “adding noise” (pixelation) to your images

2) Because of the above, It can save your butt.

Let’s start with #1: Non destructive (or less destructive) image editing.

Jpgs are a compressed file format, RAW is not. For this reason the RAW files are MUCH bigger than jpg files, which is incidentally also the only downside to shooting RAW: diskspace!

So when you edit a jpg in photoshop, you are already working with less information than the RAW file. Which may be ok if all you are doing is a slight color balance and sharpening or something, but if you really need to make some more blunt adjustments like increasing or decreasing exposure, you will start to notice that your images look grainy or “noisy” as we say in photography lingo.  But make those same changes in RAW and you will notice much less destruction to your image quality. Now, I should mention that if you wildly under or overexpose an image no file format in the world is going to save you, but by now you know how to shoot in manual mode and how to read your camera’s histogram so you know you are exposing properly. Right? ;)

But even when you metered and read your histogram correctly and exposed correctly for your subject, you may still have overexposed to the point of losing details of small bright areas of your image (known as “clipping” the highlights).

Using a RAW image editing program like Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom allows you to use the “recovery slider” to tame those bright spots (within reason) so that they won’t print as pure white, which is to say those areas wouldn’t have any printing at all because printers can’t print in the absence of color and your prints will look crappy.

So that’s the “save your butt” part.  What about other advantages?

Ok, here’s another big one: Ease of White Balance (WB) adjustment.

What is WB? WB is essentially setting the correct color temperature so that your image neither appears too blue, too yellow, to magenta or too green.  If you leave your camera in auto WB mode (which all cameras are set to by default) your camera will try to guess at the correct WB  for you, but it will guess wrong most of the time.. quite wrong actually.

Here’s an example, correct WB on the left, SOOC (straight out of camera) to the right:

Notice the ghastly bluish cast over the whole image on the right? Zombie baby!

In fact, when I look at the images of photographers who are just starting out, the incorrect WB stands out almost more than any other technical deficiency… almost uniformly their images look too blue (blue babies = SCARY!)

Now, to be clear: RAW will not magically set the right WB for you unless you set custom WB in camera or use a digital gray kard (subject of a future post!), but it makes it a whole lot easier to adjust than if you just try to find the correct color from within photoshop, and it does this with the temperature (yellow/blue ) and tint (green/magenta) sliders.

Photoshop has color balance layers, channel, curves and levels layers with a gazillion adjustments you could do to each (and you may even need to tweak these after you find the correct WB level in RAW) but trust me when I tell you it is soooo much easier to get this correct in RAW vs in photoshop.

The difference from the right image to the left, was the adjustment of just those top two bars (temperature and tint) in Lightroom:

and here are the same controls but in ACR which is technically a free “plug-in” for Photoshop for handling RAW files that you can download from Adobe for free:

You will notice that there are lots of other adjustments you can make in both LR and ACR, and all of those before you even OPEN the image in photoshop! The point of this goes back to what I said about less destructive image editing: If you make the majority of your adjustments to the RAW file itself before opening it and doing final tweaks in Photoshop, you will be preserving the best possible image quality.

So, that’s the upside to shooting in RAW, what are the downsides?

Well, I’ve already mentioned the biggie: filesize.  My mark II RAW files are 27.5 MB EACH! Which would explain why I just had to buy a terrabyte External hard drive. (The RAW files from the Rebel are about half that size – but still way more than the highest quality jpg.)

The other is that unedited, the jpg files that your camera produces will actually look BETTER than the equivalent RAW file. That is because the camera manufacturers have built all sorts of magical formulas for making that jpg look great including S curve, sharpening, saturation and other neat little adjustments.  So the image in RAW (depending onyour settings) can look a little less sharp, a little less contrasty and you will have to add those back in to taste, but the point is that YOU will be making those decisions and not letting the camera make them for you.

In summary, shooting in RAW is definitely not for everyone – if you do very little post processing tweaking to your files, don’t batch process, are uncalibrated and don’t really want to – you probably are just fine sticking with JPG.

But if you want to do more post processing and still maintain the highest image quality and control over the final output – go get yourself a huge external hard drive and start shooting in RAW! Chances are, you’ll never go back…

This is something I just learned how to do.. select JUST the highlights of an image so you can invert the selection and brighten everything BUT the highlights. Why is this useful? Because so often there are  some areas on the subjects face that are already close to clipping (a value of 255) particularly in the red channel but you still want to brighten or add contrast.. this is one method of doing just that.

I also show how you can use a selective color layer to just add blacks to give a further effect of adding contrast without effecting bright areas.

The before and after difference are subtle but trust me this is a useful thing to know..

Watch it below or click here to see a larger version. Have a great weekend!

Here is the video:

And here are some excellent resources to read up more on histograms:

A thread on good exposure based on histograms and what is known as “shooting to the right” (getting as much light as possible without clipping the highlights).  This is a link to I Love Photography which you need to register (free) to become a member to read.  It’s an excellent site and you won’t regret joining and you’ll learn tons!

“Understanding Histograms” which goes much more in depth than my little lame drawing in the video.. as you can see, mine was a BROAD generalization, there are many different types of histograms.

Happy shooting, and have a great weekend!!